Third Novel

THE BIG CAGE (342 pp.) -- Robert Lowry--Doubleday (^3).

Robert Lowry's first book, Casualty, published in 1946, was a story of stagnation in a U.S. Army camp in Italy, of sullen enlisted men, buck-passing officers, drunkenness, boredom, brief and fatal outbreaks of violence. His second, Find Me in Fire (1948), told of the return of a crippled soldier to his home town after the war, and of his inability to find a place for himself in it again. The Wolf That Fed Us, published earlier this year, was a collection of eight war stories, which had the spare narrative, the graphic power and something of the grotesque humor of Erskine Caldwell's early writing.

In his fourth book Lowry has now written the story that most American novelists write first, the autobiographical novel. The Big Cage is the account of the education, boyhood, family life, first writings and first loves of a writer. It is the recurrent theme of recent American literature, the story of Look Homeward, Angel, of Moon-Calf, A World I Never Made, The Genius, This Side of Paradise and innumerable other tales of sensitive, gifted and egocentric youth at war with the narrow constraints of American culture.

The Big Cage's chief claim to novelty is that Lowry has exaggerated it, overplayed it and touched it up with interludes of near-slapstick adventure. His Richard Black of Gorker Street in Cincinnati decides to become a great writer at the age of nine, and on his attic typewriter pounds out stories of Tan the Wonder Dog, of Detective Jim Burdett, of the tenth-round comeback of Battling Ramsey. Later, influenced by Caldwell, Hemingway and Faulkner, he turns out endless stories of prostitutes, gangsters, murderers. In college he edits a highbrow magazine and runs away with the wife (five years older than himself) of a law student. After they have hitchhiked, ridden freights and slept in cheap hotels, she writes to her mother, who comes and takes her home, while Richard adventures on through the South. As social history, The Big Cage is sometimes authentic, sometimes unconvincing. As fiction it is notable mainly for Lowry's ability to take sentimental and overworked material and brighten it with a calm and matter-of-fact humor.

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